Catfish Review

This is the movie they invented Spoiler Alerts for.

Catfish is not the "scary movie" the marketing materials and trailer will have you believe. And that's a good thing... ish.

Its trailer wants you to think this is a genre film, from Rogue "The Unborn" Pictures, no less. It wants you to believe that this "Is or Isn't a Documentary" about a young New Yorker's search for his Facebook crush, which takes a turn into Blair Witch or Paranormal Activity territory. The movie even has a scene of legitimate tension -- one where our documentarians creep up on the grounds of a Manson-family farmhouse in the middle of the night, that preys on the audience's expectations for how such a "Don't Go In There!" moment should play out.

Instead, Catfish doesn't de-evolve into a Blair Witch successor. In some ways, it does the scarier thing. It asks: What if Leatherface didn't come out to kill our filmmakers? What if instead, our young man in love just came upon an empty house and more questions about the woman he may have fallen for? What if these new questions set our hero on a new quest for answers about who this social network friend of his really is?

Nev Facebooks his new maybe fake ladyfriend.

That choice is a risky one, especially for audiences expecting faux-doc scares with their Friday night at the movies. But it works for the most part. It works because the filmmakers want to tell a story wrapped around identity, and the ease in which sites like Facebook make it for us to fan-fic our lives with as many identities as we want. To make a living novel out of the real; to exaggerate the truth of who we are to satisfy what we want to be in the eyes of others.

To say anything more than that would be to spoil both the frustrating and dramatically-satisfying experience Catfish provides for those who don't mind being duped into expecting one movie, and getting another.

And I say "story" because, as the movie explores themes of identity and what people will do for love and validation, the audience searches for proof that this movie is indeed "100 percent real, no dramatizations used here" the directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman would like you to believe.

We wish our Internets would introduce us to more girls like this.

But Joost and Schulman surround protagonist Nev Schulman (Ariel's brother) with too many convenient beats throughout the course of Nev's online courtship, too many scenes that feel more tethered to a scripted origin than one that just happened to come out of real events.

A blow up between brothers Nev and Ariel Schulman, about going too far with profiling a then-relucant Nev's life, feels canned and never reaches the impact it should. Real life doesn't have so many seemingly constructed plants and payoffs that the "real life" of Catfish does. (Most guilty of this is the last scene, where a minor character emerges with a monologue that conveniently explains what the title means. Just try to watch it and feel like you're not watching filmmakers think they got you.)

Ultimately, as engaging a movie as Catfish is, you can't help but feel like you're watching filmmakers thinking... no, believing... that they pulled off a master trick. That there is no way you can see what's up their sleeve, but in reality, you can. You can because at times the directors overestimate their craft and underestimate your ability to spot when they tilt their hand.

I purposefully remained vague about plot details and too many scene-specific turns. To know where the movie is going would deny the fun of experiencing that for yourself -- and be prepared that where the movie takes you may not be a place you intended to go.

Caution: If you see Catfish, blame the marketing to some degree if you spend most of the movie watching it through a microscope as opposed to just letting the story wash over you. Don't entirely blame the filmmakers for giving you something different, for trying to put a heartfelt, if at times artificial, spin on the role Facebook and the Internet plays in how we perceive ourselves and others.

It's not perfect, but it's search for truth -- or that which stands for the truth -- is more inspired than what passes as worth the admission price nowadays.